A breath of fresh arias: Canadian companies aim to bring opera to the masses

At the age of 400 years old, opera’s got a bit of an image problem. Financial peril forced Ottawa’s Opera Lyra to cancel the final two shows of its last season, stagings of The Flying Dutchman and Tosca. Elsewhere, the art suffers a reputation that’s dogged it since its inception — a perceived inaccessibility — and forced its makers to reinvent the horn-helmeted wheel.

“To say that it was originally for the people and then taken by the bourgeoisie is just wrong,” says Aria Umezawa, the 24-year-old artistic director of Opera Five, a new Toronto-based company that aims to bring opera to the masses through short productions in casual settings.

The problem, as Umezawa puts it, is that opera was never intended for the masses in the first place. “It was never really something that was meant to be accessible,” she says, explaining opera’s inception as an instrument of cultural one-upmanship between royal courts.

Opera Five’s oeuvre is, on the other hand, emphatically accessible. Each performance consists of three short works accompanied by an amuse-bouche that thematically corresponds with the work being performed. Talk Opera, one of the trio of operas in the company’s early-December lineup, is premised on a Jerry Springer-esque talk show; it will be delivered with a serving of Starbucks cake pops.

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Umezawa is one of a handful of young opera aficionados in Canada seeking to revive the medium by subverting its stuffy reputation, launching their own companies fresh out of music school with small budgets and abundant passion. Another is Joel Ivany, whose Against the Grain Theatre launched in 2011 with a jeans-and-T-shirt production of La Boheme at Toronto’s Tranzac Club — an intimate venue better associated with folk and bluegrass bands than Puccini.

“I think that people don’t know what opera is, because it’s not a part of our upbringing,” Ivany says. “We just don’t do that as North Americans. So you only hear about it from maybe TV shows, where they present it as the stereotype of the big lady with the horns.”

Outreach is one antidote. Canadian Opera Company associate director of education and outreach Katherine Semcesen says the company is incessantly at work on developing new ways of packaging their shows that will resonate with the public; free performances, and performances geared toward youth, are essential components. Encompassing both is GrimmFest, an upcoming week-long commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the Brothers Grimm’s collected fairy tales that will feature free performances and lectures, culminating in the 500th staging of composer Dean Burry’s The Brothers Grimm.

“For any given program that we do, we always go to the core of opera, which is storytelling,” Semcesen says. “We’re fortunate that, in opera, storytelling means being able to tell a story through music, drama, and design. It’s a multidisciplinary art form. So we keep that in consideration, regardless of what age group we’re working with.”

But convincing audiences to give opera’s storytelling charms a chance demands ingenuity. In anticipation of its current season, newly minted general director of Ottawa’s Opera Lyra, Jeep Jeffries, oversaw an ad campaign straightforwardly named, I’m Going to the Opera, which featured a number of high-profile locals (including mayor Larry O’Brien) singing opera’s — and Opera Lyra’s — praises.

“We hadn’t done a show in almost a year,” Jeffries says, “so we had kind of dropped off the radar of the community.” In the wake of the campaign’s buzz, Opera Lyra’s comeback production of La Boheme sold 80% of its seats.

“[The campaign] did what it was supposed to do,” Jeffries says. “It convinced people who didn’t know much about us that there were some pretty influential people who thought that going to the opera was cool, and that maybe it would be cool for them too.”

“Cool” may not be a word typically associated with opera, but Ivany points out that his stripped-down productions draw an impressive number of young, social media-savvy audience members. Rather than fight his audiences’ generational smartphone dependencies, he invites concertgoers to tweet their impressions in real time, while performances are being staged. He understands that people feel compelled to share what moves them.

“You get these singers who aren’t microphoned, and what comes out of their tiny little voiceboxes is incredible,” he says. “If it’s done well, there’s nothing more exciting.”

GrimmFest runs from Dec. 4-8 at various venues in Toronto. Visit coc.ca for more information. Talk Five’s trio of operas run from Dec. 4-6 at Toronto’s Gallery 345. Visit operafive.com for more information.